Teaching creationism in science lessons...

[Stingo]

Originally Posted by Baph

lots of stuff and opinions etc...

As above, a hypothesis is someones opinion that has to be tested. All science is an opinion until it is proven to other people.

some stuff and opinions etc..

Hang on a minute. Surely science is fact. That's why it's science. Ohms law, Faraday's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures blah blah blah etc. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen, the heart pumps blood etc...

Originally Posted by Stingo

Hang on a minute. Surely science is fact. That's why it's science. Ohms law, Faraday's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures blah blah blah etc. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen, the heart pumps blood etc...

Nah, fundamental tenet of science is that it lays itself open to be disproved. Probably closer to say "if it can't conceivably be one day disproved, then it's not science".

Water being made of hydrogen & oxygen. Well, everything we know so far points to this as being as close to "fact" as we can get. Yet still we haven't the foggiest what the bits in the middle are. And at an atomical level you get some really vague answers if you ask what an electron actually is. Is it a particle? Or a wave? Or some kind of probability density definition? So water being made of hydrogen and oxygen is by no means fact, it fits all our models at the moment, and our models allow for prediction, but they also allow, indeed invite, future scientists to disprove this and theorise, with supporting evidence, that water is actually made of hydrogen, oxygen and pink elephants.

[Stingo]

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

Nah, fundamental tenet of science is that it lays itself open to be disproved. Probably closer to say "if it can't conceivably be one day disproved, then it's not science".

Water being made of hydrogen & oxygen. Well, everything we know so far points to this as being as close to "fact" as we can get. Yet still we haven't the foggiest what the bits in the middle are. And at an atomical level you get some really vague answers if you ask what an electron actually is. Is it a particle? Or a wave? Or some kind of probability density definition? So water being made of hydrogen and oxygen is by no means fact, it fits all our models at the moment, and our models allow for prediction, but they also allow, indeed invite, future scientists to disprove this and theorise, with supporting evidence, that water is actually made of hydrogen, oxygen and pink elephants.

Surely if science lays itself open to be disproved, it must therefore have already been proven and so be fact as opposed to be maybe.

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

So water being made of hydrogen and oxygen is by no means fact, it fits all our models at the moment, and our models allow for prediction...

And here we have the most important point yet brought up. Unless you're one of a tiny number of research scientists, an appriximate model is all that's important.

99% of the time we use science to achieve a practical end. Water being made of hydrogen and oxygen might not be a 100% verifiable fact, but to someone designing a new kettle, who cares?

Same goes for things like evolution. It's the most accurate model we have for explaining bio-diversity and tends to do a good job of explaining what we see. Just like science is unable to say 100% that waters wet, evolution doesn't need to be proven to be useful, nor should it prevent it from taking precidence over less creditable theories.

Originally Posted by Stingo

Surely if science lays itself open to be disproved, it must therefore have already been proven and so be fact as opposed to be maybe.

We get into semantics here, but I suppose the best way to approach it is to take an extremely narrow view of what you're actually "proving". I'm sure a proper grown up scientist will correct me but I *think* you'd have difficulty finding a scientist who says they can prove water is made from hydrogen and oxygen. What I suspect they'll be more open to is "proving" that water contains hydrogen and oxygen, and as a side note they may mention that no-one's really found anything else in there.

So for all practical purposes, as the Squirrel points out, for example kettle manufacturers, water=hydrogen+oxygen = fact.

You can test this again and again, and thus far the results appear to be the same every time. Water does indeed contain hydrogen and oxygen. But we're leaving open the possibility that water could contain other things too, just that nobodys found it yet. We also leave open the possibility that under different conditions (eg. at near light speed, super high gravity) water might not contain hydrogen and oxygen at all. But for the kettle manufacturer, they're not interested in that.

One day, someone will figure out what the bits in the middle, between the atoms are, and find out all sorts of things that can be done with them which may or may not tally with our existing models of how molecules and atoms work. I'll adopt my armchair scientist pose, and invoke the wrath of proper gown up scientists everywhere (you know, the ones with bushy beards) and call this stuff in the middle "dark matter". At this point, mere mortals and kettle manufacturers become interested and Tefal will bring out their new kettle that seperates the hydrogen, water, and dark matter before individually boiling them and then re-combining them, in the process actually generating more electricity than it took to boil and in the same process apparently breaking the previous given "law" of conservation of energy.

This is the great asset of the scientific approach, it invites people to say "I think this is wrong, and here, I've devised some experiments which support my revised model". Beliefs (typically religious beliefs) don't really invite people to disprove them. While a belief will ultimately fall back to a position of "because God made it so", science says "Why?"

Sidenote: I don't think any of this means that a belief in a God or many Gods can't sit quite happily alongside science. The creationism versus evolution debate typically gets dragged into this, with God being pitched against science. On this debate however the reality is that evolution is up against the closest thing the creationists can muster as a scientific text, that is the Bible. And only the first dozen or so chapters of Genesis at that. Belief in God does not (in my mind at any rate, and the great thing about belief in God is that no-one can tell me I'm wrong) require a literal belief in every word of the Bible.
See what I did there? Nobody can tell me that my belief in God is wrong, no matter what they produce, I can always fall back to belief. Ergo my belief in God is not science.

Sidenote 2: If anyone's really interested in my own personal beliefs, then yes, I'm fairly sure in myself that I believe in some form of cosmic karmic devine entity. And I'm fairly happy with a lot of the basic tenets and moral parables found in any religious text you care to mention. There's a lot of waffle in them about what meat you can and can't eat on what days, what you can and can't do on a Friday and the like, but every religous text has some fundamentals which I believe to be a basic Good Thing(tm), don't kill, don't steal, don't shag yer best mate's missus, altruism and good will to your fellows. All of those can be found in the Bible, the Koran, Torah, Brahmana, etc.

Sidenote 3: Unless of course, you live in a Severn Trent Water region, in which case for three weeks this year, water contained hydrogen, oxygen, raw sewage and donkey poo. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a Fact.

Going a little off track:-
Just for a joke I thought I would say " why don't they teach cretinism in science lessons ", however when I was double checking the meaning of Cretinism I came across something which I did actually find funny, due to the religious as well as the scienctific meaning.
THIS IS TAKEN FROM WIKIPEDIA:-

The term cretin was brought into medical use in the 18th century from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below). It was used widely as a medical term in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but in recent decades has spread more widely in popular English as a markedly derogatory term for a person who exhibits stupid behaviour. Because of its pejorative connotations in popular speech, the term has been largely abandoned by physicians and health care workers.
The etymology of the word cretin is not known with certainty. Several hypotheses have been proposed. The most common derivation provided in English dictionaries is from the Alpine French dialect pronunciation of the word Chretien - (a) Christian, which functioned as a form of greeting in those parts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the translation of the Latin term into "human creature" implies that the label "Christian" is a reminder of the humanity of the afflicted, in contrast to brute beasts [1]. Other sources have suggested "Christian" refers to the "Christ-like" inability of such a person to commit sin, because of an incapacity to distinguish right from wrong [2].

[Stingo]

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

Sidenote 3: Unless of course, you live in a Severn Trent Water region, in which case for three weeks this year, water contained hydrogen, oxygen, raw sewage and donkey poo. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a Fact.

So - not withstanding all the donkey poo that you have to hand in the the Severn trent area, and that this substance is inclusive when you pay your water rates - not exclusive - do you believe that creationism should be taught as part of the science curriculum in schools? Or should it be tuaght as a standalone subject - bearing in mind that we are dealing with the minds of children who do not know what semantics are and are still being 'moulded' in many ways, and that the school term is finite, not infinite - AND that many other subjects are to be taught such as mathematics, English etc?